Randy Lubin's Blog

Musings on Startups and Technology

[randylubin]

2019 Recap

Wow 2019 went by quickly! I had a great year, full of incredible travel and wonderful collaborations. Here’s an overview of how it went

Living in Japan

Avital and I spent three months living in Japan this spring. It was an amazing experience full of delicious food, good friends, and new culture. I did a pretty good job documenting the trip on this blog – posts tagged Japan2019 – and I uploaded tons of (mostly food) pics to my Instagram.

Not a week goes by that we don’t turn to each other and say: we should move back to Japan! We probably won’t get back there in the near term but we would love to spend another multi-month stint there in the next few years.

Returning to SF

As amazing as Japan was, it was great to move back to SF and catch up with friends and family. We’re loving our new place in Bernal Heights and are pretty settled in. We’ve hosted a bit already and are looking forward to hosting a bunch more in 2020.

We’re planning to be (mostly) in SF for the long haul and are getting involved in local politics. We attended our first YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) meeting earlier this month and are excited to engage with policy folks to make SF more affordable through high density housing and better transit.

Leveraged Play

I spent much of the year as a professional game designer under the Leveraged Play brand, making games and experiences to help organizations explore the future and explain the present.

I designed and ran five main games:

HAL of Justice (exploring internet policy)

Climate Change / Land Use (prioritizing interventions during a summit)

Walking the Future (envisioning urban change)

Threatcast 2020 (election manipulation through technology)

Trust and Safety (on fraught decisions on a trust and safety team)

You can read all about them in my Leveraged Play 2019 Recap.

Ultimately, the market for serious games is still small and the sales cycle is glacial so I likely won’t be working on Leveraged Play full-time in 2020. That said - I’m still accepting commissions!

Job Hunt

With Leveraged Play moving to the back-burner, I’m excited to find a new job in 2020. I’d love to make the move to venture capital but there have been very few postings that meet all my criteria:

Bay Area or remote

Mid-career role (principal or senior associate)

Consumer or enterprise tech

Already have a diverse team

I’m also looking for an amazing startup to join. I’ve loved playing the business generalist / COO role in early stage companies and am excited to find another incredible team to join. The themes I’m most excited about are the future of work and AR/VR but I’m open to any startup with an amazing team and meaningful vision.

Consumer Games

Beyond my Leveraged Play work, I got to work on some great games and experiences through my consumer game studio. You can read the full recap on the Diegetic Games blog but my highlights were running staged games with audience participation at both the Roguelike Celebration and Big Bad Con.

I also got to play a ton of phenomenal storytelling games this year – at least 28 larp and RPG sessions by my count. I’m confident I’ll play even more next year and hopefully release a bunch of games too!

Final Thoughts

Overall, this was an incredible year full of major life events. I’m deeply grateful to have an amazing partner in Avital as we craft a life together that involves creating wonderful community, living in exciting new places, playing infinite games, and making a meaningful impact. I’m excited to see what 2020 has in store!

[randylubin]

Live Present Slides - my first Chrome Extension

I just published my first Chrome extension: Live Present Slides It solves a specific facilitation problem – how can you update Google Slides live without dropping out of Present mode?

I've run a handful of games where information is presented to the players via a Google Slide but player actions directly affect the data presented. For example: in a voting game, a slide might show live polling info that changes as the players take actions to influence voters.

The old solution was to have one tab open in Present mode and another in normal Edit mode. The tab in Present mode is on the big screen projector / TV and the Edit mode is used to update slides as data comes in (manually or through an embedded graph). However, Present mode uses snapshots of the slides and you need to exit and reenter Present to update. This is inelegant and if you forget to refresh, you’re showing old / bad data.

Raph D’Amico came up with a brilliant work around for our run of Dungeon Court at the Roguelike Celebration. My laptop was driving the projector and showing the current court case and participants. He was busy onboarding the next case, generating their characters, and creating the next slide with their info. From an experience design perspective, we really didn’t want to keep closing and reopening present mode.

His solution was to open Chrome’s inspector and manually delete the unneeded HTML elements (sidebar, menubar, rulers, etc). With those elements gone, the slide took up the entire screen; it looked like Present mode but live updated because it was still in Edit mode. Brilliant!

I’ve used that approach since but it’s a bit tedious to carry out. If for any reason you need to reopen the tab mid presentation, you definitely don’t want to re-delete those elements live on stage.

Hence the Chrome Extension – one click and it automatically removes the unwanted HTML elements. Then, just enter full screen and you’re good to go!

[randylubin]

Leveraged Play 2019 Recap

I founded Leveraged Play in 2018 to make serious games that help organizations explore the future and explain the present. Over the course of 2019, I got to design a bunch of great games with wonderful clients and collaborators – I am thrilled with the output!

This post will cover the main games I made as well as the outlook for Leveraged Play.

HAL of Congress

The first commission of the year was from Santa Clara Law School as a fun closing activity their conference Internet Law Works in Progress. I teamed up with Mike Masnick and Leigh Beadon to create HAL of Justice.

The game is set in the far future where AIs control all branches of our government. The players take on the role of the AI judges and are assigned to three factions based on what they are programed to optimize: Human Happiness, Economic Output, Human Freedom. They then discuss and vote on five proposals to change the laws, each of which deal with different aspects of emerging technology.

For each case, three players are assigned as petitioners with different perspectives (e.g. the Cyborg, above) and quickly make their case to the room. Then, the judges have five minutes to ask questions to the petitioners. Finally the judges vote on whether to accept the proposal.

The event was a hit and attendees had a great time. The format worked well and was inspired by Jason Morningstar’s brilliant Ghost Court. Hopefully we get commissions to run more games like this in the future.

Climate Change & Land Use

Last spring I partnered with CollabForge and Monash University’s Sustainable Development Institute to design a game for Climate Week QLD 2019. We designed an experience that kicked off a summit on climate change, land use, and biodiversity that involved senior scientists, business leaders, and government officials who were gathering for the first time with the goal of developing and prioritizing positive interventions.

The design process was a lot of fun – I got to dive deep on the complex systems around climate change and land use and to collaborate with some wonderful experts on both climate science and workshop facilitation. We developed a variety of different games and ultimately remixed them into a workshop in which participants quickly iterated on a series of project proposals. Several of those projects are going forward and will hopefully have significant impacts on the environment!

Walking the Future

In June, I ran Walking the Future at Refactor conference in LA. The game involved walking around a neighborhood and speculating on how it might transform in 2030-2040.You can read more about it in this blog post.

I’d like to make a print at home version of the game so anyone can play it but I haven’t had time yet – I’ll post it on the blog when I do!

Threatcast 2020

Last month I teamed up again with Mike to run Threatcast 2020 – a brainstorm game focused on how bad actors might use technology to manipulate the 2020 election. This was a commission from a major tech company, though I can’t disclose which one.

The game was incredibly fun to design and run and our players brought tons of energy and creativity. We organized players into five factions and each group had to generate two interventions each round (one practical idea, one experimental idea). The game played out over five rounds, from the primaries through the aftermath of the general election. The interventions were devious, delightful, and provocative and I hope we develop safeguards so that they won’t end up happening in our timeline.

We’d love to run this again! if your organization is interested in paying for us to facilitate it, please reach out.

Trust and Safety

The final major games project of the year is about trust and safety teams at tech companies and the struggles involved in developing and enforcing content moderation policies. Mike and I received a grant to develop a game on the topic and it’s shaping up nicely!

We started by conducting interviews with some of the top experts on trust and safety – both in industry and academia. We then distilled our learnings into a variety of cases and roleplay scenarios and integrated them into a two hour game where players take on the role of trust and safety team members at a new startup. The players formulate policy, grapple with difficult cases, invest in new technologies, and have tense discussions with the CEO.

We’ve run four playtests so far and the feedback has been great! Hopefully we’ll be shipping the first version of the game this winter – stay tuned...

Leveraged Play’s Outlook

I had a lot of fun running Leveraged Play this year – it was a treat to work with so many great collaborators, clients, and players. I’m deeply grateful I’ve had a chance to combining my loves of game design, business strategy, and technology.

However, the market for serious games is tiny and the sales cycle has been incredibly slow. Because of this, Leveraged Play likely won’t be my main focus in 2020. I’m definitely still open for commission (email me!) but I’m not conducting outbound sales efforts.

My aim is that I’ll be able to return to Leveraged Play full-time in the future and be able to scale it to the point where it’s sustainable. The ultimate goal is to get enough revenue to support a vast network of brilliant designers and make games that generate major insights for huge organizations. Hopefully someday!

[randylubin]

Published Short Story: Joan Henry vs the Algorithm

A few weeks back, I had a short story published for the first time! It was included in the Working Futures anthology, containing sci-fi stories about the future of work. My story is called “Joan Henry vs the Algorithm” and you can also read it for free on my site.

The story hits on a few themes / topics:

Struggling to reskill in an environment of increasing automation

Wrestling with whether to keep working in an era of basic income

What the future of paid interactive storytelling might look like

I had a lot of fun writing it and will hopefully right more short fiction in the future.

Let me know if you read it – I’d love to hear your thoughts!

[randylubin]

Back in SF!

After three (amazing) months in Tokyo and two months of house hunting (from Burlingame), Avital and I are back in San Francisco! We just moved into our new home, in Bernal Heights - not far from where I lived a few years ago.

It’s a great location, with tons of good restaurants near by, a short walk to BART, and easy access to Bernal Heights Park.

The house itself is going to be perfect for hosting (once we unpack) – we have a great set up for games, salons, dinner parties and more. We’ll slowly be furnishing the place but our ongoing joke is that the empty rooms are just VR rooms for now.

We’re set back from the street and it’s super quiet, a nice change from our last SF house which had the trolly rumbling by. We share a patio with our neighbors and it has a beautiful lemon tree we get to look at every time we walk out the house.

It feels great to be back in the city and we’re looking forward to being much more social, attending plenty more events, and even getting involved in the local YIMBY movement!

Now that things are settled, I’ll be trying to blog weekly again... we’ll see if it sticks!

[randylubin]

Playing with the Oculus Quest: consumer VR has arrived

I recently bought the new Oculus Quest VR headset and it’s incredibly impressive. I’m convinced that this will be the year that consumer VR goes mainstream and I suspect the Quest will be the smash hit this holiday season. The surge of new adopters will lead to more startups and investment in VR content kicking off a positive feedback loop drawing in new customers and content creators.

I’ve been playing around with VR for years and while I’ve always believed in its potential there were very real drawbacks preventing wide spread adoption:

Expensive: maybe $2,000 including the headset and a powerful computer

Poor quality, due to low resolution screens, unreliable sensors, and / or a long cord that was a tripping hazard

Onerous set-up: room-scale VR required positioning sensors around the room and dragging the controllers around the floor

The Quest overcomes most of these:

$399 starting price, same as a video game console

Decent resolution screen and great controllers

Room-scale without external sensors (there are cameras on the headset)

The experience is magical, you just put on the headset, without any cords and immediately in a rich virtual environment. The quality of the room-scale experience is phenomenally immersive and I’ve enjoyed friends and family jump in and be blown away.

While previous generations of VR felt like a cool gimmick, I anticipate using the Quest almost every day for a combination of exercise (finally fun!), entertainment experiences, and social spaces. Hopefully I’ll have an opportunity to design to VR experiences as well.

Despite loving the Quest so far, there are a few downsides:

The current content library is a little small and a bit overpriced, though I expect that to change rapidly

A lot of the UX in both the OS and apps is clunky, but I’m sure these will improve quickly

The headset is a bit heavy and uncomfortable after an hour of use

These are fairly minor quibbles, though, especially compared to past generations.

If you’ve been considering getting into VR, now’s a great time to jump in!

[randylubin]

Checking out Games4Change

This week I swung by NYC for the Games4Change festival. It was my first time attending and it was great to see lots of designers working on serious games for social good.

The most helpful session I attended gave an overview of different government grants that are being given out for game design, mostly by NSF, NIH, and the Department of Education. It looks like they have extremely long application cycles but the grants are quite sizable $200,000 and up. I’ll be looking into them a bit more and possibly applying later this year.

Most of the conversation was round digital games but I did find some great analog designers to talk to. Hopefully next year there will be even more folks working on in-person games!

[randylubin]

“Walking the Future” / RefactorCamp

I spent this weekend in LA at RefactorCamp and it was a great! This was my fourth time attending and full of quirky intellectual insights and discoveries.

I designed a lightweight game for this year called “Walking the Future” which 35 of us played this afternoon. We went on a ~hour walk around Santa Monica, speculating on how the neighborhood might transform in 2030-2040.

I passed out cards with different components of the city / society / technology / inhabitants and as we walked around, used those cards as lenses to look at aspects of the future. Participants then created short vignettes that used their cards as well as inspiration from our surroundings (a transit hub, a park, a school). They also reponded to prompts such as “What was the biggest IPO that year?” or “What was the biggest protest event?”

It went really well! Folks seemed to have a great time playing it and we generated some fascinating visions of the future. I’ll definitely continue refining the game and write up a share-able version soon so that anyone can run it where they live.

[randylubin]

MageFrame - Interactive Fiction / AI co-authorship

I just received my unique copy of Robin Sloan’s latest weird experiment, MageFrame / ‘And Every Time the Dark Lord Wins...’ and it’s super interesting.

The fictional premise is that wizards are trying to fight back against the ‘Dark Lord’ and are running simulations to find a successful approach, but in each simulation the heroes are defeated.

The way MageFrame works is that each reader (e.g. me) fills out a Google Form with narrative prompts (e.g. What do the questers seek?) which them is fed into a AI (GPT-2) algorithm that fleshes out a meta-scenario designed by Robin. The unique result is then mailed out to the reader, including a map!

You can see my results below – the AI did a surprisingly decent job of creating a legible story, though how much is due to Robin’s meta-structure I’m not quite sure.

I think this is a really cool approach to interactive storytelling I’m keen to see more experiments like it in the future. A few natural extensions could be:

– Serialized stories where the reader provides new prompts after each “chapter”

– Prompting more storytelling on the part of the reader through both open ended and pointed questions. Single-player rpgs and larps have been exploring this space for a bit and I think there could be a cool hybrid approach with a GPT-2 algorithm

[randylubin]

Tokyo, またね

Our three months in Japan were over all too quickly!

We had a phenomenal time living in Tokyo and exploring beyond. Our days were filled with countless amazing meals, great conversations with locals and expats, gorgeous hikes, fascinating museums and landmarks, and so much more.

We weren’t ready to leave!

That said, we were deeply grateful for the time we had there and appreciate that it went so well. We’re already dreaming of future trips back - maybe later this year, maybe in 2020.

[randylubin]

Tokyo Game Market

This weekend I had a chance to attend the famed Tokyo Game Market and it was great!

Game Market features tons of Japanese board game and tabletop RPG designers and I had a lot of fun wandering the booths and checking out games, even if I couldn’t understand most of them.

Some of the more unusual games that caught my eye:

“It’s Actually Hard to Take a Photo” A game that involves building a town out of cardboard and then trying to get optimal photos that include as many animals as possible.

“Strange Vending Machine” which involves feeding (fake) coins into different vending machines.

Gift10 Industries had a few board games that used phones in interesting ways. The middle one is “Floorplan Cards VR” and has one player using a phone to look around and describe an apartment in VR while the other players race to guess which floorplan they see.

“Group Date TRPG” is a storytelling game about Japanese Gokon (group dates). One of the character archetypes is “unrequited love”

“Summon Skate” has plaers saving the world through figure skating by skating out symbols that summon monsters to help your cause.

In “Karepo” you play a woman trying to live her best life, from 20-80 years old. Designed by a financial planner!

I had a great time wandering through Game Market and would definitely go again if I happen to be in town!

[randylubin]

Hiking the Nakasendo

The weekend, we hiked the Nakasendo Trail through Kiso Valley in the Japanese Alps. The hike followed the old mountain route from Kyoto to Tokyo and passed through several towns that preserved their Edo-period aesthetic.

We had a great time and put in some serious mileage - today we hiked 16km over a mountain pass.

Some pictures from the trail:

[randylubin]

More delicious Tokyo bites!

Every week here is filled with great food – here are some standouts from the last few days:

Soba noodles in a chicken broth with black truffle:

Taiyaki with camembert cheese:

Sweet potato tempura:

Konjaku noodles:

Okonomiyaki:

We’re down to just two weeks left in Japan but I’m sure we’ll squeeze in a ton of great meals.

[randylubin]

Back in Tokyo

After some fun but exhausting travels, it’s good to be back in Tokyo for a bit and have a routine again. We’ve been keeping things low-key but have still had time for great food. Here are some recent pics of great dishes, but you can always find more on my Instagram, @randylubin.

[randylubin]

Kyoto Part 2, Okayama, Takamatsu, and Naoshima

Continuing from last week’s post on Kyoto and Nara. 

On Monday we checked out Nijo Castle in the morning

Then we had an incredible kaiseki meal at Nijojo Furuta. This was my first kaiseki, which is a traditional Japanese meal of small plates and it was phenomenal! Photos: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bwi-knIpUsY/ Then we checked in at Hiiragiya, a 200 year-old Ryokan (guest house). It was a phenomenal experience with gorgeous rooms and amazing service. We had a great kaiseki meal there, too and a delicious Japanese breakfast with tons of small bites.

After leaving Hiiragiya, we travelled south to Okayama where we checked out the castle and Kuraku-en gardens.

The next day we took the train south to Shikoku island which included a beautiful 8-mile bridge over the inland sea.

We arrived in Takamatsu and quickly checked out the the castle there, which included another great garden

We then ferried to the small nearby island of Ogijima which had cool art houses, painted boats, and a hike to a lighthouse

The next morning we caught a ferry to Naoshima, the famed art island where we slept over in the Benesse House museum. The island was covered with art installations and it was a treat to hike around and take them all in.

The next day we took the long journey back to Tokyo: Bus -> Ferry -> Train -> Train -> Shinkansen -> Taxi. We were completely exhausted but it was well worth it!

[randylubin]

Kyoto & Nara

I’m traveling this week with Avital’s parents and we’ve spent the past couple days in Kyoto and Nara. Previously, I’d only spent about 24 hours in Kyoto and it’s been great to see more of the city.

We spent most of today in Nara, capital of Japan before Kyoto, and visited temples, shrines, and gardens while hanging out with the tame local deer.

[randylubin]

Mount Takao

Last Sunday we took a great day trip to hike Mount Takao, a small mountain on the edge of Tokyo. We took our local train line about an hour east, through greater Tokyo megalopolis until we reached the mountains.

We took a beautiful trail up along a river bed and were rewarded with great views of Tokyo and nearby mountains from the top (also ice cream)! We took a different route down and got to some interesting temples and shrines, plus more great views.

This was a perfect day trip and great way to get out doors!